The only counters I noticed were for routing the capitol ship and defending the capitol ship, so probably no special ops when I was there.Spec ops get you a mission bar on top right saying how many you have left to kill or avoid or help... If you don't have a counter then spec ops were not there, AI can kill them if you avoid them... but takes way longer for AI too do so...
If your only seeing one cutter your lucky normaly 2-3 every battle... for me..
There might have been more than one cutter but I only targeted the one.